


Truth or Truth

by bluegrassbaby



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Boys Kissing, First Kiss, Honesty, Love Confessions, M/M, Sharing Body Heat, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27328489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluegrassbaby/pseuds/bluegrassbaby
Summary: On a cold winter night, Sherlock joins John under the covers to share heat and truths.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Kudos: 78





	Truth or Truth

Cold, cold, cold, bitter, freezing, icy cold snuck into the cracks between my gloves and my sleeves, penetrating my skin, my blood, my bones. The stench of stale hay and manure saturated my matted hair and filthy clothing. I had been here three nights waiting for the man to return to this god-forsaken abandoned barn in this god-forsaken frozen wasteland of a country. My breath was suspended in frozen clouds before me and I wasn’t even certain I could pull the trigger of my weapon should the cretin ever turn up again. My fingers throbbed and my toes were completely numb. I closed my eyes and drifted to Baker Street, sitting by a warm, glowing fire with John….John…Christ, I miss John….no, I can’t go there or I’ll be lost. I can’t be distracted by sentiment, I have to remain alert….

I woke with a startle, my back pressed against a hard surface, heart pounding out the rhythm of fear in my chest, arms wound around my knees, a feeble defense, shivering. I was instantly on high alert. Fuck, had I fallen asleep and missed the target? I squinted into the tomb-like darkness, but all I could discern was…a bed and a dresser? Explosively, I released a half-sob of relief, feeling my bedroom wall press against the back of my head and inhaling deeply, allowing the sensations of Baker Street to assuage my slowly ebbing fear, washing it away with a tide of familiarity. I’m home. Tension leaves me in several huge exhales and I will my muscles to relax and my shoulders to ease back into a more natural pose. I hadn’t woken like this in over a year. I used to jolt awake in terror on a regular basis--thrashing in bed, rolling off the bed, curled in the corner as I was now, sometimes inside the closet. In the excruciating months after Mary died, when John had shunned me, and the following months in which our relationship had been under tentative repair, I had chosen to engage in psychotherapy. If or when (I had desperately hoped for the when) John moved back in, I didn’t want to be plagued by nightmares and trauma. I had wanted a fresh start. I wanted to move forward into a new life as the new and improved Sherlock Holmes. And the plan had been successful, for the most part. My best friend and his daughter were asleep upstairs and my nightmares were now rare. So, why am I in the corner of my bedroom shivering and gasping for air in the frigid night? Frigid. My brain was clearly not working at full capacity. It was FRIGID in the flat. I must’ve been out of my bed for some time to be shivering this hard. Why could I see my breath inside our home?

I pushed myself to standing, shivering so hard that walking to the thermostat was arduous. I glared at the indicator, tapping on it, as if that would alter the reading. It couldn’t possibly be that cold in the flat! I flicked the switch on and off aggressively, to no avail. The heater was broken on the coldest night of the year.

Rosie! Despite my still spasming muscles, I moved quickly to the hall closet, extracted our extra blanket and vaulted up the stairs. I very quietly eased open the door to John and Rosie’s room, trying not to wake either of the snoring Watsons. I was relieved to find that it was slightly warmer in John’s room than it had been in my own. Gently, I placed the soft blue fleece over the sleeping two year old, tucking it in around her feet. I leaned over and tenderly kissed her head, warm against my lips, sparsely covered with fine blonde hair, and I worried about her cold ears. Should I try to slip a hat over her head? That would wake her and if she was sound asleep, she couldn’t be very uncomfortable. Unsure of what to do and not wanting to risk her falling ill, I gingerly sat at the edge of the John’s bed and placed a hand on his shoulder to wake him.

“John,” I whispered. My convulsive shivers were vibrating the mattress and John gasped awake.

“Sherlock,” he croaked in a loud whisper, “ your hand is freezing!” The doctor grasped my cold hand in between both of his to warm it and asked, “Why is it so bloody cold in the flat?”

“The heating is out. We’ll need to call to have it repaired tomorrow. I already put the extra blanket on Rosie,“ I explained through chattering teeth.

“Oh, good, thank you. Christ, I hope they can come tomorrow to fix it. Otherwise we’ll all have to sleep in the sitting room with a fire.” John propped himself up on his elbow and scrutinized me in the dim light. “Sherlock you’re shivering so hard you’re going to break your teeth. You have no body fat. Go get the blanket from your bed and come up here.” That was an offer I could not refuse. I hurried downstairs and returned immediately to spread the blanket from my bed over John’s. Doubt, however, gave me pause….John really wanted to share his bed with me? I wanted nothing more in the world than to share warmth and sleep next to this man, but—

“Sherlock, for God’s sake, get in here and get warm!”

Sliding beneath the covers was like slipping into a hot bath. Involuntarily, I moaned a long sigh of relief, feeling the bone deep chill begin to immediately abate.

“Mmmm, thank you. My room is even colder,” I murmured to John’s back. “Oh--do you think Rosie needs a hat? That’s what I woke you to ask. Her ears are cold. I’ll go downstairs and get one.” I lifted the covers, prepared to run downstairs as quickly as possible, but John reached behind him and pulled me back into the bed.

“No, stay here. I think she’ll be fine with the extra blanket. If she’s too cold she will wake up and tell us about it. Come here, come closer. “ John pulled me tightly against him, pressing his back into my chest. My body craved his on so many levels and my heart fluttered as I struggled to keep my thoughts pure.

“Christ, your toes are so cold, we’re going to have to check for frostbite in the morning!” John exclaimed in a loud whisper. He slid his leg between mine, sandwiching my feet between his own in an attempt to provide warmth to every inch of my freezing skin. “We’re staying this way until you stop shivering,” said John, managing to infuse his authoritative doctor tone into a whisper. I hummed my assent into the nape of the doctor’s neck. I would be content to remain in this position for eternity. “Were you up, out of bed? How did you get so cold?” I was reticent to tell John about the dream, about waking shivering on the floor. I had the dreams mostly under control and didn’t need to worry John with them. He accepted my silence and the hypnotic sensations of our synced breathing and shared body heat lulled us back into slumber. My last lingering thought was that I would have sabotaged the heater many winters ago had I known this would be the result…

The ache in John’s shoulder frequently woke him after a few hours and forced him to roll over and sleep on his other side. This observation was validated by years of studying his sleep patterns—on the couch, hotel beds, his own bed in Baker Street. The double blankets were heavy and soothing on top of us and he turned over carefully, preventing the cold room air from infiltrating our cocoon. In his half-asleep state, he had completely forgotten that I had joined him until we were face to face. I blinked sleepily at him in the darkness, only half awake myself. John inhaled slowly with a soft smile and said in a nearly inaudible whisper,

“You smell like home.” *Oh*. My eyes open fully and the haziness of sleep falls away in a wake of surprise. Just as I mirrored his smile, John immediately felt foolish and backtracked, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that out loud. That was awkward,” he said, as he ducked his face toward the pillow.

“It’s ok,” I say quietly, warmly, giving him permission to be honest and open. John gave a small self-conscious huff of a laugh and then spoke again quickly, seemingly before he lost his courage on this anonymous winter night,

“I had the same thought the night you came back. At the restaurant, when I attacked you and you were on top of me. I just wanted to *feel* you. I needed to put my hands on you, to touch you, to experience you with all my senses in order to know you were real, that you were really back. Your scent is what reassured me the most. It was like coming home.” He risked a glance up at my face and found my wide, wonderous gaze fixated on him. We didn’t do this. We didn’t talk about big things, emotional things, our past. It was unprecedented and with a flurry of what could have been excitement or anxiety, I realized that I had no idea where it would lead. “Your turn,” he said quickly deflecting the intensity back to me. I blinked at him, uncharacteristically clueless.

“My turn for what?”

“Truth or truth. I told a truth, now it’s your turn,” John responded matter-of-factly, as if this was a common occurrence between flatmates sharing a bed in the dead of night. I smiled again and said teasingly,

“Even I know it’s called truth or dare, John. Not truth or truth.”

“When we were kids, Harry and I used to play truth or dare. As we got older, our dares became so reckless that mom said we were only allowed to play truth or truth. Besides, I figure that you and I have completed a lifetime’s worth of dares in a decade, anyway. But we have a significant deficit of truths between us.” Blue-green eyes flash bright enough to see in the pitch dark. A deficit. An accurate word chosen by a physician. I hesitated and the cold, dark room waited to hold our secrets in suspended animation.

  
“Truer words have never been spoken.”

“Right. So, you tell me a truth, Sherlock.” John had already been so candid. I could do this as well. I owed it to him.

“I missed you. I missed you *so* much when I was gone,” I finally whispered in a tremulous yet emphatic voice. “I know that I had the very unfair advantage of knowing that you were alive, but it still hurt so deeply to miss you every minute of every day. I didn’t expect that. I had never cared about anyone before, so I vastly underestimated how painful it was going to be. It hurt more than the bitterly cold nights, more than the knife wounds, more than the hunger, more than the lashes on my back. It was…one of several major miscalculations on my part. ” The click of my swallow echoed in the thick silence of the room into which neither of us dared to breathe. “Truth,” I demanded with a sudden exhale.

“OK. When you were gone, Greg confiscated my gun. I was—I was that bad. People worried. I thought about suicide. I thought about it before I met you and I thought about it when you left me.” My stomach clenched and a small, indescribable sound escaped me as I slid my hand into John’s, which lay on the bed between us. The thought of losing him to himself was unimaginable. The doctor’s eyes slipped shut and he closed his fingers over mine.

“John—”

“Nope, your turn. Truth,” he interrupted. I ached with the pain of his honesty, but I knew that we needed this debridement in order to heal. We had to complete what we had started on this strange winter night that had brought us together.

“The overdose on the plane wasn’t accidental. You probably knew that. Or suspected it, at least. I was sent on a fatal mission. It was the price I had to pay for killing Magnussen. But I was determined not to spend another 2 years working alone in barren wastelands and die at the hands of some nameless criminal. I wanted to choose the terms of my death. I was never going to see you again and I wanted you to be the last person I spoke to. I wanted your words to be the last thing in my thoughts before oblivion set in. ” John’s fingers tightened around mine. “Truth.”

“Your timing was shite, Sherlock—”

“My timing has been terrible with you since the day we met,” I interrupted with a wry huff of a laugh. “Sorry, it’s your turn. I’m listening.”

“If you had come back earlier….if I hadn’t been so far into it with Mary….” John leaves his sentence unfinished. His eyes find mine in the dark, and I can read the regret despite the lack of light and the passage of time.

“But then,” I say gently, “ You wouldn’t have Rosie and that would be…unacceptable.” John’s face crumpled before reassembling as he continued to squeeze my hand in his and said shakily,

“You’re right. You’re always right. Truth.” We were doing this. It was now or never. I forged onward, come what may, because anything less than truth at this point, would be a betrayal.

“I’m not always right. If I hadn’t turned you down that very first night in Angelo’s….I was scared. I was scared of how I felt around you. I’d never felt truly attracted to anyone before. No one’s opinion of me had ever mattered before. I was frightened by the thought that I could be at the mercy of a cascade of chemicals in my brain. That I could care about someone, need someone else. I wanted to remain an island, aloof and in control, but you—” I choked for a moment before the words tumbled from me in an unrelenting torrent— ”You penetrated my defenses. You slipped beneath them with your smiles and your tea and your loyalty. You got into my head and under my skin. I almost told you on the tarmac, before I got on that plane. I wanted to tell you, but again, my timing was terrible. I couldn’t leave you with that, knowing what I was about to do. I’m sorry, I—"

“No, stop, Sherlock. Stop apologizing. I realized it at the pool, with Moriarty. I knew, then, that I’d do anything for you. Absolutely anything. And when you were gone, I swore to myself that I would never, ever again love someone without telling them. I told myself—if I can make it through this, I will not live life the same. But then you had to come back right when—”

“I know, we’re back at my shite timing again.”

“It had been so long and it felt like things were different between us, stilted and awkward a lot of the time. I wanted to go back to the way things were, but I had already moved forward and was so far into it with Mary and I did care for her at the time—before I knew she was a spy, before she shot you. So, I told myself, this is how things were supposed to be. I forced it. It felt like wearing shoes on the wrong feet. It never felt right and I know I wasn’t acting like….I know I wasn’t there for you. But, Christ, Sherlock, I didn’t know how to fix it and you were….distracted and distant, texting all the time and—”

“I know. It wasn’t just you. You certainly don’t bear the sole responsibility for that. I was getting over…or learning how to deal with---” the darkness swallowed the end of my sentence. I had never spoken to anyone about my trauma. Only Mycroft knew about it. He read it on my face and in my body and had encouraged me to seek help. John’s thumb caressed the back of my hand gently.

“Tell me.” I looked into his bright, compassionate gaze and took a bracing breath,

“I struggled with nightmares of—well, you’ve seen my back. That was part of it. A lot happened while I was gone. I had flashbacks at first, I was on edge all the time. While you were busy with—” my throat closed involuntarily, stopping my words as I flailed for control, refusing to cry now. I was over it, I had spent hours processing it with a therapist, it no longer had power over me. 

“Hey,” John, said, soothingly running fingers through my inky curls in the inky night. “I should’ve been there for you. I’m sorry. I was totally self-absorbed and conflicted around the time of the wedding.” I shook my head, denying the apology, collecting myself.

“After Mary’s death, when we weren’t talking, I went through therapy. Intensive therapy for trauma.” John’s hand freezes in surprise and drops to the bed between them,

“You did?” 

“Yes. I wanted to be…..I wanted to be whole and healthy, in case you and Rosie…if you wanted….well, I just wanted to get sober and be there for you and Rosie, if you let me.”

I felt unusually inarticulate, but the sharp edge of these whispered truths left me feeling raw and vulnerable. I had never been laid so bare before another human and I floundered, clinging tightly to John’s hand as I attempted to slow my breathing.

“Sherlock,” the doctor whispered thickly, fighting tears. “I’m sorry for the way I treated you after Mary’s death. I was horrible to you and you didn’t deserve it.” 

“We were both going through a lot. You came with me to Sherrinford and that meant everything to me, John. Everything. It made up for any way in which you think you’ve wronged me. I would not have survived that without you. Just having you there by my side was---” I stopped to clear my throat again, my voice imbued with a deep undertones of regret. “Thank God I didn’t lose you in that well.”

“I’d follow you anywhere, Sherlock. Anywhere that you’ll let me come. Like you told Mycroft, we’re family.” Overwhelmed with gratitude and love, I drew John into my chest and held him desperately. His arms snaked behind my back and his hold on me was equally tight.

“Are we done?” I murmured into the hair behind his left ear.

“Hm?”

“Are we done with truth or truth?”

“Yeah, I think that’s enough,” John responded with a soft chuckle against my chest.

“Are we going to be the same?” He stilled against me.

“You mean after tonight?” His tone was cautiously neutral. He was stalling. He knew exactly what I was asking.

“Yes. After this.” The tension I felt in his body escalated my own. My heart was beating so wildly inside my chest that it could have cracked John’s rib where it pressed against mine. I anxiously awaited his answer. I knew what I wanted—I desperately wanted more. Yet, even more desperately, I didn’t want to lose John for it. My arms squeezed him more tightly of their own accord—in anticipation of the potential loss of the most important thing in my life.

“Whatever comes of this night, I can’t lose you,” I blurt abruptly. Unaware that I was going to say it, my jagged words cut through the darkness.

“Sherlock, can I tell you one last truth?” He sounded suddenly calm. I froze, unsure of whether my life was ending or beginning.

“Yes.”

“It took us twelve years. Over a decade. But, I think we finally got our timing right.” I pulled back to look into my best friend’s gaze.

“Have we?” I asked breathlessly, hope infusing my heart, my mind, my soul. I felt giddy, as if I might float away into this cold night. John nodded slowly as he sighed softly and slid his fingers into my curls, tethering me to this bed with his fingers and his love. He gently eased my head toward his own. Our lips were mere millimeters apart and with a small moan, I crushed our lips together. We came together again and again, tasting, exploring, claiming one another, our bodies rapidly heating under the layers of blankets.

“We will not be same after tonight, ” he finally murmured into the rough stubble between the edge of my mouth and the corner of my jaw. “We’ll be so much more.”


End file.
